My 7-year-old does not understand the “Hello Computer” joke from A Voyage Home. You can just talk to computers now… it’s no longer funny. (Unrelated: I’m old.)

Every once in a blue moon, I need to use (^|...) in a regex to check against either the start of the string or certain characters, and it always feels weird to me.

Never used it in production code, but someone at Labs once actually asked for an elegant way to express exactly what a Ruby flip-flop did, and I took much pleasure in demonstrating this ridiculous usage of a Range. This was back during the pre-Slack days of email lists, so I never did find out what people thought of that.

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1611159965351444480

wow, a thing that seemed obviously fake, and was then shown by data to be probably fake, now has the people who were pushing it saying it was possibly not as true as they claimed all along

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html

Woah, this name has been so ingrained in my general consciousness since I’ve been doing tech that this appropriation literally never occurred to me until now. 😞

RE: https://kith.kitchen/users/ehashman/statuses/109643891393466206

Huh.

A while back I saw an r/woodworking post where someone was asking for resources for woodworking plans. A few people told them to Google it.

If you Google it you get absolute horseshit. Just page after page of useless results. So we need to stop the fucking "let me google that for you" era and recognize that search is entirely broken in the modern day. We NEED human recommendations and information sharing now more than ever.

One of the best "anatomy of a bug" stories I've heard in ages: how TikTok's auto-captioning interprets numbers. I love computers so much. (via @nomeatmashers@tiktok.com)

Woah. https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=458709&post_id=68974559

I talked with people at GitHub at the time who told me that, after getting more details from Heroku, the GitHub security team assessed Heroku as a major security risk due to the responses from the Heroku security team. GitHub immediately instructed the use of any Heroku products within its business to stop, and for staff to assume a full compromise on all Heroku keys. Some smaller sites were running on Heroku at the time, and they were turned off, with the secrets and passwords not reused elsewhere.

I wrote a quick thread about adopt a drain, civic tech projects, and tech solutionism vs community resilience over on the (yet another account) where I intend to talk about those sorts of things: https://mastodon.publicinterest.town/web/@christa/109637661557174041 #cawx #sfwx #civictech

TIL about galactic algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm

An AI test from 1971 shows you need to adjust your #ChatGPT expectations.

In 1971, Terry Winograd devised the Winograd Schemas, simple sentence understanding tasks that require the use of knowledge and commonsense reasoning. Humans understand them easily. ChatGPT... not so much.

Attractive nuisances in software design: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2023/01/attractive-nuisances.html

A common anti-pattern where a problem has a solution that is obvious, intuitive and wrong.

#python #programming

Finally moved off Terminal.app (to Alacritty, for now) since I was fed up with not having 24-bit color.

This is an image of the decision tree that Slack used 5 years ago to determine whether to notify someone.

Every time you add a customization option like "don't notify me during these times in my time zone" or "mute notifications in this thread" etc, you add another branch or set of branches to a decision tree.

This is NOT a bad thing, but it is a reason that I am resistant to customization. Each knob you add expands software complexity and room for bugs.

Source: https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint/

Woah, this brought back memories.

As I recall, Microsoft was always the most friendly toward treating web apps as if there were native apps, listing them as first-class citizens in their stores and such, but I’m not sure how much of a thing that is anymore since they aren’t much of a player in the phones and tablets world anymore (although I do think the Surface Duo is cool). But surely a truly native Windows app is .NET and C# and whatnot.

When I was an SDET in Windows Mobile, I worked on both 6on6 (IE6 on WM6) and W3C Widgets. Probably to no one’s surprise, these weren’t done out of a belief in web apps, but because iOS was by that point already holding a commanding lead in the app ecosystem.

RE: https://toot.cafe/users/slightlyoff/statuses/109632248664696707

Speaking of Adobe chicanery, here's the very detailed graphic chart made by @xdanielArt of alternatives to #Adobe products. Many are #free and #OpenSource.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/01/01/the-allspaw-collins-effect/

Huh, this reminds me of doing Puzzle Hunts. I wonder if Puzzle Hunts could be organized in a similar manner as incident response? 🤔

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/

It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve seen one technique for teaching programming talked about online much (if ever). In my HS CS class, Mr. Stueben gave regular (dead-tree) quizzes where we had to predict what a piece of code would do, but where the code was purposefully formatted in misleading ways.

I don’t know if it’s actually good pedagogy, but I do think it was very effective for me and made me understand very early on that what the code looks like is not actually related to what it actually does.